RAID

RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There are different RAID types depending on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

All content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be placed on fast SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue operating smoothly until the problematic drive is changed and the data is synced on it.

The SSD drives that are used for storing any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we provide function in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data copied on such a drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what information will be cloned on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the data on the new drive shall be correct. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue functioning normally and the malfunctioning drive won't impact the proper operation of your sites by any means. Using SSDs in RAID-Z is a superb addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our top-notch cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses special digital identifiers known as checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.

All VPS server accounts that we provide are generated on physical servers that take advantage of SSD drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one extra bit is included in the data copied on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the accurate information is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your Internet sites will stay online as all the information will still load from at least 1 other drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of the data will be stored on standard hard disks which also operate in RAID as we would like to make sure that any site content you add will be risk-free all the time. Using multiple drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.